One-bit processor and a mega-cool Turing Machine

I don't know about you, but I am REALLY tempted to build one of these Turing Machines for myself..

My chum Alvin (my co-author on several books) just pointed me to a rather interesting website that describes a 1-bit processor. Since it’s a 1-bit processor, this little scamp supports only a single type of instruction. Before you read further, if you were doing this, which instruction would you choose to implement?

...tick tock... tick tock... tock tock...

Well, the creator of this little beauty opted for a Copy then Branch-If type of instruction. The idea is that the machine copies the current bit to one address, and if that bit was one, then it branches to a second address.

But wait, there is more, because someone who was commenting on one of my blogs on MicrocontrollerCentral.com mentioned a really interesting article on the BBC Technology website (Click Here to see the original BBC article).

This article describes the “goings on” at the annual Maker Faire in Newcastle, England. It seems that this year there were a plethora of exhibitions to tempt the curious and the geeky – everything from mushrooms that make music to Steampunk Jewelry.

One item that really captured my attention was a mechanical computer that is programmed by the movement of ball bearings.

Students of computer history will recognize this as a Turing Machine, just like the one Alan Turing envisaged and explored in his mathematical paper that kicked off the computer age.

I don’t know about you, but I am REALLY tempted to build one of these for myself. I can imagine it chuntering away executing some program here in my office…

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Actually, could someone send me a link to the design for that thing. Like others, I wouldn't want to duplicate it, but a clearer idea of how it works would be a big help in making something similar. Send links to SparkyWatt@yourScienceQuestions.org

In 80-s I was in a team who made electronics for "Buran" lunch. And there one of computers was 1-bit... Therefore I well know that item.
You can see some photo here.
http://iosifk.narod.ru/cosmos.html
I need some time for the translation. Here are references to my articles on my site...
http://iosifk.narod.ru/one_bit_cpu1.pdf
http://iosifk.narod.ru/one_bit_cpu2.pdf
and this is a project
http://iosifk.narod.ru/selfmade_cpu2.zip

OK, 8 years ago I did the project in FPGA. There there were two processors - with the 16 bit command bus and the 17 bits data bus, and other processor with the 1 bit bus. Then I have published about it article in Russian. In magazine "Components and Technologies"...